Charlotta Hilli leads the study programme in Higher Education Pedagogy and works as a university lecturer at the Department of Educational Leadership and Development work (Åbo Akademi University). Hilli supervises master's and doctoral students in education. 

Hilli's research field is distance education with a specific interest in Didaktik (i.e., teaching and studying) in virtual and hybrid learning environments. She has been involved in developing distance and hybrid teaching practices in higher education, adult, secondary and primary education. Hilli often collaborates closely with teachers, school leaders and personnel during iterative and practice-based processes (i.e., Participatory Action Research, Design-Based Research).

At the moment, Hilli is developing frameworks for distance teaching. She is inspired by Bildung-oriented theories like teaching-centred Didaktik (i.e., Berliner-didaktik) that identifies important relationships and conditions for teaching. Hilli approaches learning environments with posthuman theories that identify entanglements of human, other-than-human, spatial and temporal relations in education. Hilli has studied entanglements of spatiality, affects and temporality within hybrid and virtual collaboration (student-student, teacher-student) in education with the help of postqualitative approaches, for example, posthumanist Bildung (Carol Taylor), the cyborg metaphor (Donna Haraway) and posthuman ethics (Rosi Braidotti).